Question Using an external email server.. [How to test settings?]

[LionKing]

Server operating system version

Linux Ubuntu server

Plesk version and microupdate number

Plesk Obsidian Version 18.0.55 Update #2

Pretty much as the subject says:



So our question / issue is that we cannot confirm that the settings actually work. We definitely do not receive any emails/notifications from Plesk.

Is there a way to test this?
It is quite strange that the Plesk team have not built in something such obvious in need, such as a "email tester" function into the configuration of this so you easily can figure out if it is working or not; plus see what errors are generated so you can fix it.

Kind regards

 

[Kaspar]

The obvious choice to test any smtp connection would be the telnet command. But there are other options too. I found this article/tutorial that explains various testing methods.

Hope this helps you a bit.

 

[LionKing]

Well it is our own hosted email servers and we do not have any issues with it so to speak.

The problem is that there is no way to push Plesk to send a test message so it is totally random when/if that ever happens and to do a error trace and look through our email servers logs we obviously need to have a email to search for.

 

[Kaspar]

I see. Although Plesk itself does not have a specific option to send a test email, that does not mean you can't send any mail your self for testing purposes of course. For example sending a mail via a PHP script with the mail() function should work. Another option would be to setup a cron job (scheduled task) with the notification enabled. That way an email get send every time the cron jobs runs.

Just to expand on my previous post a bit more, the telnet command (as well as the other options mentioned in the link) can be used to test SMTP communications between servers. You might know SMTP as the protocol used to sent email with from a email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, ect). But SMTP is actually the protocol used by servers to commutate with each other for email too. So telnet is useful for testing if a SMTP connection can be made at all between servers.

 

[LionKing]

We just did a test by using the "mass mail "function and just doing a simple test template and then chose to send that to ourselves.


Our VPS/Plesk do not even attempt to contact our email server.

We checked our mail server logs and it is not even contacted so no traces to be found. The out going "mass mail" fails of course.

Not sure why Plesk does this?

 

[Peter Debik]

Is port 25 open in your data center's firewall?

 

[LionKing]

Is port 25 open in your data center's firewall?

Yes it is open on our side, but as you know port 25 is blocked these days by most ISPs around the world due to spam so nobody uses port 25 anymore.

We have port 25, 2525 , 465 and 587 open for our email server. We have tried Plesk to use our email server with port 587 and 465 SSL and nothing happens.

 

[Kaspar]

[...] so nobody uses port 25 anymore.

That's not entirely true. All email traffic between (external) servers goes trough port 25. Some hosting/cloud providers block port 25, which forces users to relay their mail traffic over a different port to another server (a mail relay server), which in turn sends out email messages via port 25.

Getting back to your issue, I am not sure why your unable to make a connection and/or relay email from your Plesk server to another. My experience with MSMTP is limited. However, instead of using MSMTP you might want to consider just using Postfix. You can relay email with Postfix too, with the benefit of having more control/configuration options compared with MSMTP. And also having regular maillogs, which helps a lot with troubleshooting.

There is a support article explaining how to configure SendGrid as an email relay in Postfix. Which is of course a bit different from your use case. But the steps should be fairly similar for your setup.

Hope that helps.

 

[LionKing]

from your Plesk server to another.

We are not using Plesk for email at all for any email functions in our company.
We are running our own Windows email server with MailEnable installed: https://mailenable.com
All we want with Plesk is to receive the administrative notifications it (Plesk), sends now and then...which is useful for our IT-department.

 

[Kaspar]

We are not using Plesk for email at all for any email functions in our company.
We are running our own Windows email server with MailEnable installed: https://mailenable.com
All we want with Plesk is to receive the administrative notifications it (Plesk), sends now and then...which is useful for our IT-department.

I get that, otherwise you probably weren't using MSTMP in the first place. But administrative notifications are send via email too, are they not? So my previous post still applies.

 

[LionKing]

you probably weren't using MSTMP in the first place.

You are correct in your assumption.
So nope; we never used it since our servers are strictly for internal corporate use and we just use Plesk as a easy management tool and to partition our servers for different roles. The first thing we did with Plesk was to strip it and uninstall everything, like you mentioned above and other unnecessary services such as DNS servers, email etc.

 

[LionKing]

You can relay email with Postfix too, with the benefit of having more control/configuration options compared with MSMTP. And also having regular maillogs, which helps a lot with troubleshooting

Well in theory we could; but opening up potential security risk by installing new functions such as email/postfix to the Plesk servers would probably not make my bosses happy. The whole point is to only allow Plesk to handle the hosting part /management - for other server roles my employer have other servers set up.

 

[LionKing]

The whole point is not to have mail server program on the Plesk servers like MSMTP or Postifx etc..
We use real dedicated email servers with Mailenable for that function.

Removing all unnecessary services - only keeping the hosting part - makes them more secure and lighter/faster too as the Plesk server do not have to deal with loads of various services. We do not sell hosting so, only for internal use so for us this is the best way.
Now back to the issue, it is kind of weird that Plesk doesn't even do the connection. It would be nice to have this working to we do get the admin notifications.
It is not operation critical for us, but it would do a difference and would "be nice to have" it working.
Any idea to guide us in the right direction would be appreciated.

Thanks again.

 

[Peter Debik]

I suggest to open a support ticket to let support staff investigate the issue on your server. They will be able to find out whether the cause is on the server or off the server.

To sign-in to support please go to https://support.plesk.com

If you experience login issues, please see this KB article:
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/...rt-plesk-com-and-password-reset-does-not-work

If you bought your license from a reseller, your reseller should provide support for you. If the reseller does not provide support, here is an alternative:
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/12388090147095-How-to-get-support-directly-from-Plesk-

 

[LionKing]

I suggest to open a support ticket to let support staff investigate the issue on your server. They will be able to find out whether the cause is on the server or off the server.

To sign-in to support please go to https://support.plesk.com

If you experience login issues, please see this KB article:
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/...rt-plesk-com-and-password-reset-does-not-work

If you bought your license from a reseller, your reseller should provide support for you. If the reseller does not provide support, here is an alternative:
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/12388090147095-How-to-get-support-directly-from-Plesk-

Thanks for your valued feedback.